So the
Five Eyes‘ daisy chain is alive and well. I encountered this at first hand with
my own application under Canada’s Access to Information Act (ATIA), submitted
in December 2006 and documented elsewhere. In summary, after a hideous
delay not countenanced by the framers of the Act, I got 73 pages of redacted rubbish. I came very close to giving up, but
some obstreperous flame kept me going to find out whether my own country
was living up to its obligations under international humanitarian law,
which the Supreme Court of Canada declared
was “binding,” in case anybody had any doubts. I’m talking
about an international criminal conspiracy conducted by NATO countries
to conceal grave breaches of international humanitarian law.

In my pursuit of the information,
ultimately ending up in Federal Court [.pdf], my request
was denied on the basis of Section 15 of the ATIA. My understanding
is that my own request for judicial review was only the third to have
been made under Section 15, and the first to the Department of National
Defense. Federal Court Justice Simon Noël had a lot to say about
Section 15, and I read all of it [.pdf].

As it turns out, the information
I was requesting was in a completely different document, “The Campaign
Against Terrorism Detainee Transfer Log,”
almost exactly in the form I was requesting, which the Department of
National Defense “analysts” chose not to reveal. One could
call that an obstruction of justice if one had the time.

Not having the time, we have
a situation that I don’t imagine the authors of the ATIA could have
imagined, which is that Section 15(1) is abused by the executive to conceal
war crimes. Furthermore, in the jurisdictions of the Five Eyes
– all of whom have freedom of information legislation – there is
always an exemption for “international relations.” Call it what
you will. I suggest what is happening now is FOI to CYA.

“Evidence held by the
Foreign Office, which had until now been kept secret, shows that the
Security Service was aware that Mr. Mohamed was deprived of sleep, ‘shackled’
during interrogation, and threatened with the idea that he might ‘disappear.’

“MI5 has also been accused
of feeding questions to Mr. Mohamed’s interrogators, leading to accusations
that it was ‘complicit’ in his torture.

“The Foreign Secretary,
David Miliband, had repeatedly refused to release details of how much
the U.K. knew about Mr. Mohamed’s treatment, claiming that doing so would
deter the U.S. from sharing intelligence in the future.”

“Suleiman
wasn’t just the go-to bureaucrat for when the Americans wanted to arrange
a little torture. This ‘urbane and sophisticated man’ apparently
enjoyed a little rough stuff himself. Shortly after 9/11, an Australian
citizen, Mamdouh Habib, was captured by Pakistani security forces and,
under U.S. pressure, tortured by Pakistanis. He was then rendered (with an Australian
diplomat watching)
by CIA operatives to Egypt, a not uncommon practice. In Egypt, Habib
merited Suleiman’s personal attention. As related by Richard Neville,
based on Habib’s memoir:

“’Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General
Omar Suleiman. … Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of
links with al-Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before
9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with
high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten,
his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.’

“That treatment wasn’t
enough for Suleiman, so:

“’To
loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely
shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib – and he did, with a
vicious karate kick.’

“After Suleiman’s men extracted Habib’s confession, he was
transferred back to U.S. custody, where he eventually was imprisoned at
Guantanamo. His ‘confession’ was then used as evidence in his
Guantanamo trial.”

“One of his inquisitors
may have been Egypt’s top spy. ‘Mr. El Maati thought that he recognized
his interrogator from the news and that he might be Omar Soleiman, the
head of Egyptian intelligence,’ the Iacobucci report says, using an
alternate spelling of the Egyptian vice president’s name.

“Unlike other interrogations, that session in the spring of 2003
did not involve violence. ‘A man in plain clothes sat across the desk
from Mr. El Maati, asking him questions … the interrogator had a pile
of papers in front of him and wrote down the answers Mr. El Maati
gave.’

“At the time, the
Canadian prisoner had a sense that others were watching through a one-way
window. The Iacobucci findings revealed that Western intelligence agencies
– including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Canadian
Security Intelligence Service – were closely monitoring what the Egyptians
were doing, even passing along questions.”

As it turns out, the Five Eyes
all have five asses, and they’re all covered… protected… serviced…
by freedom of information legislation: we’d love to reveal this
information but it would upset our trusted relations with our trusted
allies (who might or might not be committing war crimes, but nobody
knows because there’s no outside oversight). So nobody can reveal
anything because it would upset somebody else in the daisy chain.
Beautiful. A perfect circle.

I though perhaps Canada might
be – given our principled history – the unraveling of this perfect daisy chain. I had not imagined it might start in Egypt.